Are We Really Conscious?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Of course, this argumentation presupposes that a "decision" means something. These same scientists typically argue that behavior is essentially deterministic, assuming one could model the brain completely.
But if that's the case, wouldn't it be more efficient not to construct this elaborate video game and instead have the system operate based on a set of complex rules, sort of how one would build an expert system or neural network?
It seems to me possible that consciousness is bound up with "free will." Perhaps animals evolved consciousness because it enabled them to harness some sort of property of the universe that improved decisionmaking precisely because it could improve on the results of a rule-based expert system. This would rely on some concept of non-determinism.
Obviously I can't explain a mechanism for the above, which is a key reason a scientist would reject it.
Still, I find existing explanations for the evolution of consciousness lacking. Also, determinism is drastically at odds with our experience of life, though that doesn't necessarily prove anything.
I've come to a similar conclusion. Recently it was discovered that photosynthesis utilizes some quantum effects. We should at least consider the possibility that the nervous systems of some animals have evolved to take advantage of similar effects.
It stands to reason that if a certain physical phenomenon can be invoked through folded proteins, then at some point, evolution as we know it today will take advantage of it. But we don't know whether this is consciousness or even related to consciousness at all.
Arguably, you have already said too much. Consciousness could simply be regarded as an accidental byproduct of an animal that has extensive memory making and recalling capacity. You don't really become conscious until you are old enough to make memories. So no purpose really, just an accidental effect.
You can turn off a light bulb. That doesn't mean the light isn't real.
It may be that consciousness does not work the way some people thought it did. That's interesting and useful information. But it doesn't change the fact of consciousness.
When Copernicus questioned the Earth's special place at the center of the Universe, it upset people immensely. Similarly, Darwin's ideas upset massive numbers of people to this day by suggesting that we are the product of relatively mundane forces. Human beings naturally tend to believe that they are special and that mere mechanisms cannot match their extraordinary attributes.
It's clearly upsetting to people to suggest that people are not "conscious," but in fact the spirit of the question is useful and sobering. "Consciousness" and "awareness" are loaded terms, often tinged with connotations bordering on mysticism. "Attention" is generally a more mundane word. We have no qualms recognizing engineered attention systems, while most would balk at describing them as "self-aware", or "conscious." If we define consciousness as a system with reflexive attention, then human are conscious but so are certain computer systems. What's in dispute is the quasi-mystical, highly anthropomorphic conception of consciousness, by whatever name, verses a more mundane and objective notion of sensing and modeling external and internal events.
Submitter here --- the "Brain Science Suggests We're Not" was the subheading used in the squib on the front page of the NY Times Web site; it seemed to be helpful.
Whereas this guy is buying wholesale into the idea that the brain literally "doesn’t in fact have this property [of self-awareness]", which is so beyond non-sensical it's barely worth responding to. Who is it that experiences the illusion of consciousness? Turtles [illusions] all the way down?
This statement in particular is just utterly laughable horseshit: "In neuroscience, attention is a process of enhancing some signals at the expense of others. It’s a way of focusing resources. Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color." - really? Go show me the math and computer simulation of neuroscience's understanding of the real, mechanistic phenomenon of attention, the way humans and other sentient beings experience it, programmed into a computer. Let's see some code.
"Consciousness and the Social Brain" - Michael S. A. Graziano: provides a thesis on how and in what stages this could have developed via (social) evolution...
1) Declare (usually implicitly) with no basis whatsoever that term X has this One True Meaning.
2) Demonstrate that a common instance of things generally subsumed under term X does not have the properties implied by the arbitrary and baseless One True Meaning (implicitly) declared in step one.
3) "Conclude" that therefore the common instance of X is not "really" X.
The key that this is nonsense is the use of the metaphysically loaded weasel-word "really". OK, if we aren't "really" conscious are we still just-plain-old conscious? How about conscious-enough-for-going-on-with?
The argument depends on a Platonic view of concepts, which is false (if it was true it would never be possible to create a new concept, which people in Plato's time almost never did, but we do all the time.)
"Consciousness" does not identify some Platonic form or Aristotelian essence, but a set of empirical properties that are a) found in organisms with a particular type of nervous system and b) lead to a range of self-regulatory behaviours and c) are intimately entwined with our self-experience.
We may make false assumptions about the implications of consciousness--for example, we may assume that it is not a perfectly ordinary organic function of the brain--but there is still a phenomenological cluster whose relevance to human experience is extremely difficult to dispose of. If you for some reason really wanted to use the word "consciousness" to mean something that had nothing to do with the three characteristics listed above, you would still have those three characteristics left over, and it would still be in a position where having a single word for them would be quite convenient.
For comparison, suppose we believed that the process of digestion was essentially one of combustion, but at some point we learn that in fact digestive acids and enzymes are doing something that is quite different from simple oxidation (combustion). If someone said that that point, "Do we really digest? Stomach Science Suggests We Don't" everyone would look at them rather oddly, because everyone outside of philosophy departments knows that "digestion" means "the process of breaking down food in the stomach whatever the cause of that process happens to be" rather than "this one particular explanation for the process of breaking food down in the stomach".
This is not a small error, and there are entire fields of philosophy (most of post-war Continental philosophy, in my view) that are nothing but instantiations of it. "We have found that conscious is not unitary, therefore the self does not 'really' exist" is one of the more ridiculous notions of this kind.
It's like someone looking under the hood of an automobile and finding that the engine can be taken apart, and then declaring (as if it was a deep insight instead of a hilarious mistake), "Internal combustion is a myth!" because it is accomplished by a machine that's decomposable into components rather than by some unitary unanalyzable magic. Only someone uncritically wedded to the idea that consciousness (or internal combustion) must really be unitary (why?) would make such a claim, and yet there is no basis in the phenomenon that requires us to insist on such a characteristic.
Or it's like saying airplanes don't "really" fly because they don't flap their wings. Why would anyone think that "flapping" is a necessary property of flying to the extent that when they see something that flies without flapping they want to exclude it from the concept named by "flying" rather than modify their concept named by flying to include things that don't flap? Unless, of course, they believe in Plato's notion of concepts as rigidly fixed ideals rather than pragmatic tools that knowing subjects make and re-make to aid in our understanding of the world.
"Life" has the same problem. Bacteria are definitely alive. Whether viruses are alive is a definitional issue. (The argument: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-viruses-alive-...)
(Note: the article is better, as much as something can be better in trying to talk about one of the oldest "mysteries" facing humanity in 5 paragraphs written for an uninformed audience. I agreed with most of the statements of the article but it certainly didn't have time to teach me anything when it's so short.)
On the notion of the self not 'really' existing, its important to note the distinction between those that say that the sense of self is an illusion vs those that say it doesn't exist.
The sense of self is an illusion and believing that it is otherwise is just as significant of a mistake as adopting the Platonic view that objects are imbued with some essence. Subjectivity is not imbued with any essence of "selfness", though a feeling of subjectivity certainly arises just as a chair is not imbued with "chairness" but the concept of a chair being a chair still arises when we see one.
I think a Platonist would say that the concepts already exist, we just discover them. It's not a belief I hold, and it's been long enough since I read about it in any depth that I'm not going to do a terrific job defending it, but I don't think the above effectively refutes Platonism.
That statement is a contradiction, presuming the author has a brain. Consciousness is, if anything, the ability to be skeptical about the illusions our brains create. And no matter how deep the rabbit hole goes (our perception of ourselves is another dimension of illusion), we are all aware, at least some of the time, about these illusions. And that skepticism is what allows us to slowly, methodically wade through the swampy waters of our mind and to eventually build monuments (metaphorically and actually).
The author built a straw man (a muddled, confused straw man) and then deftly tore it down with the skill of a small child. It would be prudent to assume that his book chronicles a similarly sophisticated analysis of the mind, and so should be avoided at all costs.
I have an immediate intuitive grasp that it is a flawed argument and - putting to one side for the moment whether I can move beyond intuition to construct a solid rebuttal - I find it hard to understand that someone could hold this belief in good faith.
(It's subtly different to my feelings about Solipsism where I have an intuitive feeling that it's incorrect but I actually concede that it's a logically sound position to take.)
To be slightly whimsical for a moment - I wonder if this is proof that philosophical zombies exist. They could maintain this belief coherently whilst Descartes and I can dismiss it without further consideration...
Given this, when someone tries to tell you that there is nothing (or only an ineffable higher dimension) to be truly aware of, or that causality is a baffling myth, or that there is only really matter not awareness -- you know the argument is fallacious or arbitrary (not even wrong!) and doesn't deserve serious inquiry.
What faculty --other than consciousness-- would one use to inquire into the nature and existence of consciousness?
What is the evidence for this?
And who says consciousness is entirely part of the brain?
And particularly what tjradcliffe said in thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tjradcliffe
Look at an object and then turn around and face the other direction so that you can't sense it anymore. Are you still aware that the object is there? If yes, congratulations! You have consciousness.
That object you looked at still exists as a pattern of neuron potentials within your brain's inner state. If you have a corresponding inner state for an external object, you possess some degree of consciousness.
However, if you literally cannot remember anything the moment you look away from it, then yes, I would argue that constitutes unconsciousness. Without an internal state to influence your actions, all you're left with is reflexes.
I've thought for a long time that consciousness is tied up with memory in a certain way: my theory is that you can not commit anything to long term memory that you were not first conscious of. Considering the huge amount of sensory data available this is really saying something. You could even conceive of the brain not working this way- that it could store sensory data for later perusal. But I'm pretty sure it just doesn't store anything which isn't first filtered by consciousness.
I don't think it's yet understood how the brain keeps short term state. Neurons are pulse-based, so I assume short term state can at least be very crudely described as some kind of recirculating loop of these impulses. Neurons get tired, so it's difficult to keep such loops going for long. This gives us the feeling of effort to pay attention to something for a long time.
Even so, I don't think memory like this is the whole story. There is a sensory-experience part of consciousness which is hard to describe. When I experience something as simple as the color orange it's difficult to find a good analogy with anything mechanical. You could say it's what you experience when your eye generates impulses for a certain wavelength of light, but just having a certain signal is not a satisfactory enough explanation of what "orange" really is.
Time is another issue.. whatever consciousness is, it only happens "now". But what is now? If the brain is a computer then its state can be expressed as a number, perhaps written on a page of paper. You take the current state, the sensory input, follow some rules and determine the next state (and record it on the next page of paper). What's special about new states coming into being? I don't think much of anything.. so when you have a whole notebook of pages with states where is the "now"? Why does executing some mechanical process count as the feeling of experience?
If a robot can see its environment, see objects and people and places recognize them, remember them, knows where it is and that it itself is a specific type of object in that space, constructs and modifies models for all of that...how is that not "experiencing"?
Additionally, any unconscious intelligence would pass this test. Even a human in an unconscious state might pass it.
Long-term learning is an inherent property of any neural network, but short-term storage of patterns, and more importantly interpretation of those patterns, has quite a bit of overhead.
Perhaps like behaviourist pain: the unpleasantness is the wish it would stop.